After upgrading to openSuse 12.3 (keeping the /home directory) akonadi completely blocks openSuse 12.2. The reason seem to be to processes that consume all of the available memory (8 GByte). This leads first to an unreasonable amount of swapping and finally to a freeze of the system.
When the processes are stopped via systemmonitor, the memory is released first, but 2 processes seem to immediately start and again consume all of the available memory.
If the openSuse 12.2 akonadi configution has been saved, the following procedure can be used as a workaround:
Go to a console (ctrl alt F1) and login
stop the X server (sudo /sbin/init 3)
Stopping the X server seems necessary as otherwise akonadi seems to rewrite the configuration on stopping
Remove the akonadi configuration files in .config (rm ~/.config/akonadi/) and .kde4 (rm ~/.kde4/share/config/akonadi) (after saving same).
Files in ./local can remain untouched.
4.Copy the saved configuration files to ~/.config/akonadi/ and ~/.kde4/share/config/, respectively.
Restart to openSuse 12.2
Does anyone know of a milder approach to keep openSuse 12.2 using the same home directoy as openSuse 12.3? :\
What method of upgrading (a generic English word) did you use. There are several.
I do not quite understand what you say, You say that you upgraded from 12.2 to 12.3. To me that means that 12.2 is no more available on that system. Then you say that Akonadi blocks 12.2. How can it block something that is not there anymore?
Hello Henk,
I installed openSuse 12.3 in a separate partition from openSuse 12.2, using the same partition as mounting point for /home. Now if I restart 12.2 after 12.3 was running, akonadi will start consuming memory. That can be prevented by replacing the akonadi configuration files after the X server (and with it the akonadi processes) has been stopped, either prior to booting to 12.2 or after booting to 12.2.
Regards Harald
Well, this is much more information then in your original post. Thanks.
While not being able to confirm the following being the culprit in your case (I do not know very much about Akonadi), I can immagine that what you do can cause problems. In general, when you go to a next version of any software, but keep current data (bases) and configs, but where the new version uses a new format/extra parameters or such things, the new version will probably detect and convert the old data/configs to the new format. It will thus make the transition automatic and painless for the user. But the old version will most probably not be able to to the backward conversion. Thus keeping your /home is mostly a good idea when you go forward in versions, but backward might be a problem.
The same sort of problems might emerse when you skip a few versions going forward, or use the same /home with different distributions in random sequence.